In David Cronenberg’s The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle transfers from one telepod to another by molecularly collapsing and then reconstituting himself. Tragically, he’s fused with a fly that accidentally goes along for the ride and Brundle eventually becomes a grotesque mutant. Imagine now conventional instruments of late-20th century popular music making that same trip and likewise getting turned inside out by an accompanying circuit board or two. The sonic outcome might resemble the sound of Icarus, as the group (cousins Sam Britton and Ollie Bown) exhumes instrumental artifacts of the 20th century and reanimates them for the 21st.
The group thus uses the acoustic past as fodder for electronic manipulation, while still retaining the audible presence of those acoustic instruments to provide a recognizable ground for the abstract result. It’s a reasonably imaginative but not entirely original approach, as Icarus is hardly the first group to merge acoustics and electronics. Britton and Bown push the idea further by eschewing over-arching structures in favour of a more improvisatory approach within an electronic context, and that is a rather original idea. Apparently, I Tweet The Birdy Electric, the group’s rather unfortunately titled fifth album, emerged out of two years of live improvisations.
The set begins on a reasonably promising note with “Ganglion.” The group fashions a somber Godspeed mood using slowly building patterns of guitars, but unfortunately it’s paired discordantly with a busy skittering beat that grows progressively more dominant alongside it. Soon after, the thirteen-minute epic “Three False Starts” opens with acoustic guitar and electronic garbles before abruptly moving into a stumbling beat shadowed by plucked strings and bird-like chatter of tinklings, bleeps, and blurps. The buzzing noise of a hundred bees emerges followed by gamelan tones, and finally percussive clatter overlaid by string scrapings. Obviously this description indicates structure yet most of the pieces suffer from a lack of it. Directions and developments seem wayward and arbitrary, as opposed to purposeful where there’s a feeling of a grander compositional design.
The album’s a mish-mash of electronic bits and pieces that’s all fury and commotion but lacks a conceptual core. Drum patterns rarely settle into a groove but flail spasmodically like jittery jellyfish, and electronic enhancements are added so excessively they become suffocating; “Teabell,” for instance, would be an even more appealing reverie of resonant bells and chimes without the intrusive electronic effects. Icarus effectively morphs fluttering piano lines on “Essen” into stuttering shadows yet again one imagines that the piece would breathe more easily minus the electronic clutter. In short, for all its rambunctious energy, I Tweet The Birdy Electric leaves me cold. Britton and Bown are clearly deft when it comes to obsessive micro-scaping of sonic materials, but the music doesn’t move me perhaps because the pieces, by improvisational design, meander rather than develop into satisfying fully-formed compositions.
Ron Schepper |
